A well-defined brand no longer guarantees search placement. It is only through enterprise-level cultural changes, informed by a close monitoring of search evolution, that sustained SEO success can occur.

Yes, brands are still a very strong signal when it comes to ranking, however, recent advancements like authorship rank and Search Plus Your World have hyper-focused our promotion strategies.

A presumption of entitlement drives many legacy brands to complacency. Too often, we see an organization enjoy a few years of strong search results and then relax into weve got that covered mode, allowing its focus, vital resources and attention to shift to other initiatives.

But it is essential for any in-house marketer/SEO/embedded strategist to push past the corporate ego and bureaucracy to assess and identify changing technical / editorial barriers while protecting the protocol vital to traffic success.

The first sign of internal SEO procedures breaking down is often a competitor doing it better, faster and using your own assets. Nothing gets your boss attention faster than a competitor outranking you with your own ideas or contentnot necessarily via scraping or syndication, but by rewriting or covering popular stories with better optimization.

Sometimes getting beaten is a simple misstepa missed title tag on your partbut it could also be indicative of larger problems with your content creation process, from execution of best practices to keyword research to XML sitemap inclusion.

In SEO, all roads lead back to editorial. Content producers (who already have plenty to do) find and amplify the voice of a company, guarding the brands editorial integrity. But the days of search engine optimization responsibilities falling to another department are long gone.

In this age, content teams are expected to fully understand their audience. In fact, audience cultivation is their obligation. This means content producers must perform regular keyword research around their topics, identifying search and seasonal trends, monitoring news and user behavior and integrating the data back into the workflow, style guides and processes.

A lot of this information is already well known. For example, ask anyone on the editorial team and Im sure theyll know if readers use the search phrase picture over photo. But they can do more.

Thats not to say the SEO specialists shouldnt be involved as well. SEO advisers can still educate and guide the process. But if keyword research isnt decentralized, a bottleneck of tremendous proportions can effectively kill this critical step in strategy.